Like Scum, Rising To The Top:

I've joined the ranks of 'Large Mammals" in N. Z. Bear's
Blogosphere Ecosystem standings. 82 links, up from 66 in the last update.
Excellent; at this rate I'll be breathing down Den Beste's and Lileks's
and Sulllivan's necks in another month. :-)

(Why those three? They are, in my opinion, the
top thinker-essayists in the blogosphere. If I can provoke as
much thought as they do, I'll figure I've won the game. It's hard
to know directly how much I'm stimulating peoples' minds, but the
blogroll count seems like a reasonable proxy.)

posted by Eric at 1:43 PM

Diet Considered as a Bad Religion:

A current New York Times news story, What If
It's All Been A Big Fat Lie, entertainingly chronicles the
discovery that low-fat diets are bad for people. More specifically,
that the substitution of carbohydrates like bread and pasta and
potatoes for meat that we've all had urged on us since the early 1980s
is probably the cause of the modern epidemic of obesity and the sharp
rise in diabetes incidence.

I have long believed that most of the healthy-eating advice we get
is stone crazy, and the story does tend to confirm it. One of my reasons
for believing this is touched on in the article; what we're told is
good for us doesn't match what humans "in the wild" (during the 99% of
our species history that predated agriculture) ate. The diet our
bodies evolved to process doesn't include things like large amounts of
milled grain or other starches. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate
wild vegetables (especially tubers) and meat whenever they could get
it.

I've always had to suppress a tendency to laugh rudely when vegeterians
touted their diet as "natural". Vegetarianism is deeply unnatural for
human beings; it's marginally possible in warm climates only (there are
no vegetarians in Tibet because the climate kills them), and only possible
even there because we're at the near end of 4,000 years of breeding for
high-caloric-value staple crops.

So what's the natural diet for human beings? Our dentition (both
slashing and grinding teeth) and the structure of our digestive system
(short colon, no rumen) is intermediate between that of herbivores
like cows and obligate carnivores like cats; both systems resemble
those of non-specialized omnivores like bears. Actually, the earlier
hominids in the human ancestral line were designed for a more
vegetarian diet than we; they had large flat molars and powerful jaws
designed for grinding seed-cases. The increase in brain size in the
hominid line correlates neatly with a shift to a more carnivorous
dentitition and skull structure.

Physical anthropologists will tell you that the shift from hunter-gatherer
existence to sedentary agriculture enabled human beings to live at higher
population densities, but at the cost of a marked deterioration in the
health of the average person. The skeletons of agricultural populations
are shorter, less robust, and show much more evidence of nutritional
diseases relative to their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

For twenty years I've consciously been trying to eat what I think
of as a caveman diet -- heavy on the meat and raw vegetables, very
little sugar, light on the starches. I'm a bit overweight now, not
seriously so for a 44-year-old man, but enough to notice; what this
NYT article tells me is that I didn't follow my own prescription
strictly enough and ate too much bread and potatoes.

But the evolutionary analysis only tells us what we probably should
be eating. It doesn't explain how the modern diet has come to be as
severly messed up as it is -- nor why the advice we've been getting on healthy
eating over the last twenty years has been not merely bad but perversely
wrong.

The answer is, I think, implicit in the fact that "health food" has
a strong tendency to be bland, fibrous, and nasty -- a kind of
filboid studge that we have to work at convincing ourselves we
like rather than actually liking. Which is, if you think about it,
nuts. Human food tropisms represent two million years of selective
knowledge about what's good for our bodies. Eating a lot of what we
don't like is far more likely to be a mistake than eating things we
do like, even to excess.

Why do we tend to treat our natural cravings for red meat and fat
as sins, then? Notice the similarity between the rhetoric of diet
books and religious evangelism and you have your answer. Dietary
mortification of the flesh has become a kind of secular asceticism, a
way for wealthy white people with guilt feelings about their affluence
to demonstrate virtue and expiate their imagined trangressions.

Once you realize that dieting is a religion, the irrationality and
mutual contradictions become easier to understand. It's not about
what's actually good for you, it's about suffering and self-denial and
the state of your soul. People who constantly break and re-adopt
diets are experiencing exactly the same cycle of secondary rewards as
the sinner who repeatedly backslides and reforms.

This model explains the social fact that the modern flavor of
"health"-based dietary piety is most likely to be found in people
who don't have the same psychological needs satisfied by an actual
religion. Quick now: who's more likely to be a vegetarian or profess
a horror of "junk food" -- a conservative Christian heartlander or
a secular politically-correct leftist from the urban coasts?

The NYT article tells us that the dominant dietary religion of the
last twenty years is cracking -- that the weight of evidence against
the fat-is-evil/carbs-are-good theory is no longer supportable. Well
and good -- but it won't necessarily do us a lot of good to discard
this religion only to get stuck with another one.

I say it's time to give all bossy nutritionists,
health-food evangelists and dietary busybodies the heave-ho out of our
lives -- tell the sorry bitches and bastards to get over themselves
and go back to eating stuff that tastes good and satiates. And enjoy
the outraged squawking from the dietarily correct -- that, my friends,
is the music of health and freedom.